Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace

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Intelligence Contractor Wasn't Pleased When We Showed up at its Shareholder's Meet
Posted by Tonya Hennessey, CorpWatch on May 10, 2008 at 9:24 AM.

A funny thing happened on the way to exercising my presumed right, as a shareholder, to attend yesterday's annual shareholder meeting of private military contractor L-3 Communications, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan's financial district.

I was one of a group including a translator, Marwan Mawiri, who worked for a year and 1⁄2 for Titan, now an L-3 subsidiary, in Iraq. Marwan has witnessed first-hand numerous problems with the way interrogation and translation contracting is being handled in Iraq - a practice that may be putting at substantial risk the national security and lives of the Iraqi people, of U.S. and multinational troops, officials and contractors, and of the United States itself.

The problem is clear: inadequate and downright bad vetting and hiring practices for analysts, interrogators and linguists. Indeed, the U.S. military has recently canceled Titan's translation contract due to poor practices along with waste, fraud and abuse.

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Smart Supply-Side Immigration Control
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on May 1, 2008 at 12:00 AM.

Over on the front page, I argue that a more intelligent and progressive approach to immigration would focus on the largely unregulated and substandard jobs that migrant workers fill, rather than on the individuals who work them.

It's a "big-think piece," and space required me to go short on the specifics. But clearly, a smart approach to immigration control would focus on both the demand and the supply.

On the supply side, a key issue is trade -- a subject near and dear to me for a long time. We see a lot of hyperbolic discussion of immigration, but virtually no acknowledgment of the way our trade policy and larger promotion of neoliberal orthodoxy worldwide fuel human migration.

A good way to understand the relationship is by looking at the history of immigration to America, and the tensions it has caused. There is always a modest flow of immigrants coming for all variety of reasons. That steady trickle doesn't lead to much acrimony among Americans. But that modest flow is occasionally punctuated by waves of mass immigration, and that's when people get touchy about the whole thing.

While individuals have all sorts of reasons for choosing to emigrate, those peaks -- "waves" is a good word to describe them -- always come in response to a shock somewhere else in the world. Those shocks might be a civil war, a natural disaster, a famine or an economic collapse.

Our trade policy, and the larger economic ideology we promote aggressively around the world, both contribute to these kinds of economic shocks and limit other governments' responses to them.

The current wave of elevated immigration began in the 1990s, and a large share of it has come from Mexico. A number of factors are in play, but a good way to understand my point is that much of today's Mexican immigration started with corn.

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The Salaries of all Public School Teachers in New York City, Paid to One Man.
Posted by Paul Buchheit, AlterNet on April 25, 2008 at 11:50 PM.

The United States has the highest inequality rate in the developed world. 28 million Americans -- almost 1 in 10 -- are using food stamps. The average worker has seen virtually no real increase in wages since 1970.

Some hedge fund managers made over a billion dollars last year. Hedge fund manager John Paulson, who made a clever bet against subprime mortgages, made close to $4 billion.

How much is 4 billion dollars? If you work as a sales clerk in a retail store, you'd have to work 200,000 YEARS to make 4 billion dollars. If you have a steady $50,000 a year job as a laborer and work for 50 years, in all that time you'd make as much as the hedge fund manager gets in one hour at the office.

4 billion dollars would pay a year's salary for ALL the public school teachers in New York City.

Yet this money goes to one individual.

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Labor's First Strike Against the War Gains Momentum
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on April 24, 2008 at 6:11 AM.

The following is a release put out by the Vermont AFL-CIO, with thanks to reader Richard M. for sending it along ...

The Executive Board of the Vermont AFL-CIO, representing thousands of workers in countless sectors across Vermont, have unanimously passed an historic resolution expressing their "unequivocal" support for the first US labor strike against the war in Iraq.

Montpelier, VT -The Executive Board of the Vermont AFL-CIO, representing thousands of workers in countless sectors across Vermont, have unanimously passed an historic resolution expressing their "unequivocal" support for the first US labor strike against the war in Iraq. The strike, being organized by the Longshore Caucus of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), will seek to shutdown all west coast ports for a period of 8 hours on the day of May 1st 2008. The Vermont AFL-CIO is the first state labor federation to publicly back the Longshoremen; other state federations are expected to follow.

The resolution, among other things, calls the war in Iraq "immoral, unwanted, and unnecessary", states that the vast majority of working Vermonters oppose the war, and contends that the war will only be brought to an end by "the direct actions of working people." Many other Vermont labor unions and organizations, including the Vermont Workers' Center, have also made official statements condemning the war.

The resolution also calls on working Vermonters to "discuss the actions of the Longshoremen, to wear anti-war buttons, and to take various actions of their own design and choosing in their workplace on May 1st, 2008."

"Workers in Vermont and all across this nation are against this war. We have already demanded that the government end it, but they have consistently failed to heed our words. Therefore working people are beginning to take concrete steps to make our resistance known. If the war does not immediately end we, the unions and working people of Vermont, will also be compelled to take appropriate action," said David Van Deusen, a District Vice President of the Vermont AFL-CIO.

Traven Leyshon, President of the Washington, Lamoille & Orange County Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, said, "Vermont labor has long called for an end to this war. The untold billions being spent on the war could instead be used to address our domestic needs. It is working people who pay the cost of the war - in some cases with our lives, but always with our sacrifices."

Full text of the resolution after the jump ...

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Life Expectancies Dropping, Wages Falling, Food Rationing Reported -- What the Hell is Going on?
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on April 23, 2008 at 6:00 AM.

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on AlterNet's blog, PEEK.

For years, we've been financing our consumption with debt, offshoring our manufacturing base and living large -- at least some of us -- off of one speculative bubble after the next.

We can talk about stagnant wages and how dramatically inequality has increased, but that frames it passively, as a sort of natural phenomenon. But that obscures the fact that it's been an active process, with the wealthiest Americans gaming the system for a bigger piece of the pie at everyone else's expense. Meanwhile, we've been investing bupkis in our future, expecting, perhaps, to remain on the top through nothing more than raw American exceptionalism.

It's a model that was never sustainable. As the GAO once put the obvious, famously, "By definition, what is unsustainable will not be sustained." And it appears we're paying the piper, although nobody knows how much the bill will be, exactly.

A few signals of what's shaping up to be quite a crisis ...

According to the New York Sun:

Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing.

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Hey George: How's That Plan to Lower Gas Prices by Sucking Up to Oil Producers Working?
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on April 17, 2008 at 10:22 AM.

Hey, remember 2000? We had an election that year!

Let's recall then-candidate George W. Bush's pitch about how he'd lower gas prices, which at the time were averaging $1.66 per gallon [ht: Jill C.]:

Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality, by creating enough political good will with oil-producing nations that they would increase their supply of crude.

"I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply," Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, told reporters here today. "Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.''

He'd just build up a boatload of goodwill within the Arab world and then tell those rag-heads to open up the spigot! Unlike that loser Clinton ...

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Sell-out "Bush Dog" Dems Roll Over, Play Dead
Posted by Booman, Booman Tribune on April 10, 2008 at 3:52 PM.

Nancy Pelosi pulls a fast one on the Bush administration.

The House adopted a rules change Thursday that freezes the Colombia free trade agreement by waiving a requirement that Congress act on it within 90 days. The rule passed mostly along party lines by a vote of 224-195 with one lawmaker voting present.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Congress and the White House must first enact policies to help the faltering U.S. economy before approving the Colombia pact. "We should certainly do more for our economy before we pass another trade agreement," she said in remarks on the House floor.

Pelosi just changed the Fast Track trade authority rules in the House so that she is under no obligation to put the Colombia trade bill on the calendar. She has many motivations for doing this, but here's one of them:

...Democrats have argued that President Bush broke years of precedent by submitting the trade agreement to Congress without first receiving approval from House and Senate leaders...

...Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said President Bush "forgot" to consult with his panel before crafting the proposed deal with Colombia. "Let's give the House more time to facilitate an atmosphere to allow the members [to] know what's in the bill," he said.

It's instructive to look at the ten Democrats that voted against Pelosi:

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Pelosi Plays Hardball on Trade: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on April 9, 2008 at 4:28 PM.

This just off the Reuters wire:

The House of Representatives will decide on Thursday whether to put off indefinitely a vote on the Colombia free-trade agreement that President George W. Bush submitted to Congress this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. Pelosi, announcing the move to reporters on Wednesday, would not give a time frame for when the trade pact might be debated and put up for a vote on passage in the House. The vote on Thursday would change rules for considering the deal by eliminating a 90-day deadline for Congress to approve the Colombia trade deal.

This is good news, bad news and potentially ugly news.

The good news: Finally, a Democratic leader is trying to use some modicum of legislative power to halt our economically destructive and wildly unpopular trade policies. It's a start.

The bad news: Pelosi has yet to say she will work to kill the pact outright. In fact, she issued a press release earlier this week merely worrying that Bush's tactics jeopardize the final passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Meanwhile, other top Democrats like Jim Clyburn have gone on record saying they want this deal to pass (Clyburn has since amended his statement - but sometimes the truth is in the first reaction).

The potentially ugly news:

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Death by Lack of Health Insurance
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on April 9, 2008 at 2:56 PM.

Families USA has been crunching numbers compiled by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the findings are quite eye-opening.

I'm a bit too lazy to add a lot of analysis right now, so here's the press release:

In 2002, a groundbreaking national study by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated the direct link between a lack of health coverage and deaths from health-related causes. Drawing on that study, Families USA, the national organization for health care consumers, has today made available reports for all 50 states that show how many people are expected to die in each state each week because they don’t have health coverage. A separate report is also available for the District of Columbia.

The individual reports, available on the Families USA Web site, provide eye-opening numbers for every state. Among the figures cited is the fact that more than seven working-age Texans die each day due to a lack of health insurance. Other reports reveal that, on average, approximately 960 people in Illinois died in 2006 because they had no health coverage, and nearly 9,900 uninsured New Yorkers between the ages of 25 and 64 died in the years 2000 to 2006.

“Our report highlights how our inadequate system of health coverage condemns a great number of people to an early death simply because they don’t have the same access to health care as their insured neighbors,” Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA, said today. “The conclusions are sadly clear—a lack of health coverage is a matter of life and death for many people.

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Bush Will Personally Kill Colombian Labor Leaders if You Don't Pass His Stupid Trade Deal
Posted by BoRev, BoRev on April 9, 2008 at 12:03 PM.

Note from PEEK guest editor Joshua H: If you, like me, are constantly banging your head against the desk in response to the commercial media's coverage of Latin American politics, BoRev -- a rare pro-Venezuelan perspective --is a hilarious antidote. I read it every day, and you should too.

If we've learned anything about surviving the Bush era, it's this: As the number of Administration and Washington Post staff reiterating a single message increases, the probability of it all being one big, fat lie approaches one.

Yesterday our dumb president went on the teevee to force the legislative branch into a vote on a trade deal with Colombia within 90 days. And while Congress will be allowed to read and discuss the bill, they will not be permitted to amend it in any way, because of the democracy.

This trade pact is all very crucial, says Bush, because the murder rate of Colombian trade unionists has gone down this year, and you wouldn't want it to go back up now would you? Condi said basically the same thing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and of course the Post ran an editorial saying Obama must be crazy for "believing" the stories of violence at all, and on the right hand side of the same page George Will helpfully explains that last year "The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally."

Clearly we are just one Colin Powell power point presentation away from a never-ending blood spattered Colombian trade quagmire.

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A Nation of the Corporations, by the Corporations, for the Corporations
Posted by Jill Hussein C., Brilliant at Breakfast on April 9, 2008 at 10:08 AM.

If you're an American corporation, you no longer have to worry about trials for wrongdoing. Under Michael Mukasey's justice department, justice is an admonition, a wink, and a handshake:

In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.

Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.

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Pseudo-science Blames Coming Depression on Boobs
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on April 9, 2008 at 6:25 AM.

Sometimes I think the "Science for Choads" section would be better called the "Science Reporting for Choads", but that would be too narrow to include all the people that make science-y sounding claims with absolutely no evidence to back it up. Via Echidne, the latest "science confirms all your gender prejudices" story is particularly nasty in terms of implication and timing.

WASHINGTON - A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles -- sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

"You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area," said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

Remember: The capitalist patriarchy can do no wrong. That is the first rule. Everything that goes wrong is due to effeminate liberals or actual women.

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Jeremy Scahill Confronts BlackWater Honchos
Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Huffington Post on April 8, 2008 at 1:00 PM.

Last week, I spoke at a conference organized by NYU's Center on Law and Security called "Privatizing Defense: Blackwater, Contractors, and American Security." Also present at the conference were Blackwater Worldwide vice president Martin Strong and a lawyer for Blackwater, David Hammond. At the conference, I confronted Strong on Blackwater's killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square on September 16, 2007. The day after our exchange, the Bush Administration extended Blackwater's Iraq "security" contract for another year:

Democracy Now! videotaped the session and covered Blackwater's contract extension -- the video is in the window to your right.

JEREMY SCAHILL, AUTHOR, BLACKWATER: My name is Jeremy Scahill. I find it very telling that nowhere on this panel do we hear a voice talking about the Iraqi victims of these companies. I find it very interesting--the way that Mr. Strong and Mr. [Doug] Brooks [president of the pro-industry International Peace Operations Association] talk about this, we could be at a banking convention.

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